


Self-Entitlement (And Perfection)

by postcardsfromrussia



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 16:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardsfromrussia/pseuds/postcardsfromrussia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Michael Corner never wanted to play games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Self-Entitlement (And Perfection)

Blaise scours him for every hint of a blemish. He says, I can’t believe you’re so _fucking_ perfect. Michael isn’t. He’s just terrified of the day Blaise discovers this.

Michael Corner, left to stand still while Blaise Zabini touches his skin with a spiderweb grip. I want to help you, Blaise says, but Michael is only ever left feeling shaken and dizzy when he thinks, once, he was okay.

(He thinks he was all right before Blaise came.)

Michael shivers at the thought of life before Blaise. He can’t remember if this is because that life with Ginny, with Lavender, with Terry was so terrible, or that it was so wonderful that his breath catches in his mouth when he thinks of it, and he can’t do anything but shiver.

There are two sides to a life. Michael is caught between the two. He does not work - Blaise is fond of reminding him that he has money, while Michael snorts and says, “What the hell is money worth, anymore?”

Not much. It’s part of the reason why Michael doesn’t sleep, why he doesn’t work. He can get whatever he wants because he fought in the Battle of Hogwarts and somehow, that makes him better than the rest of the entire fucking world. He’s so tired of being treated differently when really, he’s just the same as the rest of them. He just picked the right side.

Blaise picked the wrong side. “There’s never,” he says, “just black and white. Except, it seems, when you’re on the other side of the goddamned war hero.”

Michael’s not sure how he feels about Harry anymore. He knows he doesn’t believe the rest of the world. Harry don’t-get-too-close-to-the-Slytherins Potter, Harry, the man who thought it would be a bloody brilliant idea to block children who could have helped fight save the House that they were in from a war that they had no part in was finished - that’s the way Blaise describes him. It makes Michael wish he hadn’t followed Harry as rigorously as he did.

“For fuck’s sake, Blaise,” he says in a heated argument one night, “I wasn’t fighting for Harry. I was fighting against Voldemort.”

(Blaise laughs, almost. “Weren’t we all?” he says, but Michael knows that’s not the case.)

There are things Blaise doesn’t talk about. His mother, for one. Blaise says he hasn’t spoken to her for years. Not since before the battle. It’s funny, how the two of them measure things in before and after. Blaise, before the war and after the war; Michael, before Blaise and after him.

*

Michael’s been corrupted, he thinks, by one of the awful Slytherins that Harry was always warning about. He finds it strange that Harry was so adamantly against the persecution of Muggle-borns but so easily for the blatant persecution of Slytherins. He almost wishes he’d been a Slytherin, if only for the satisfaction of proving Harry wrong - something Blaise never cared enough to do. He, unlike Michael, had not had a problem with living life the way it came at him. He had no issues with going his own way - not the way that Harry bloody Potter had paved out for the whole world. Harry would be scared by that.

Michael loves it.

He is tired of being pushed, back and forth, between what he has and what he wants. Sometimes he is certain that they are the same. But then, sometimes, he comes home and Blaise is not there. Michael will wait up for him until it is not night anymore, but morning, and Blaise will refuse to admit where he’s been.

Harry might be a pompous, head-up-the-arse war hero, but everyone always seems to forget that Michael is, too. He remembers nights where his heart raced all the way through his body, forming some monotonous drum beat as he tried (and often failed) to escape the Carrows. He remembers freeing first years and getting horribly tortured while Harry spent his time freeing dragons. Michael was in the thick of danger, while Harry did his damndest to stay out of it.

Of course he doesn’t know everything that happened to Harry in those months between when Voldemort rose to power and when, finally, he fell. But he does know that for those months, Harry hadn’t even pretended to pay attention to what was going on within the walls of Hogwarts (or, if he did, he tried his very hardest to not do anything about it.) He did know that for months upon months, it was up to Neville and Ginny and Luna and even he himself to do anything and everything to help the Hogwarts students. Harry hadn’t cared about them then, so why did the whole world expect that he would now?

Blaise wasn’t in Hogwarts that year. He wasn’t even in Great Britain. To the best of Michael’s knowledge, he was travelling the world, trying _his_ damndest to get away from his mother and the ongoing battle that was the Wizarding World for most of that year. Blaise had been a Slytherin, but no one knew more than Michael that Slytherin was not his defining characteristic. Blaise was many things. Few of them were good. He was manipulative, and possessive, and had the tendency to become outright terrifying.

But he was not, despite the stereotypes and prejudices that were almost ingrained into society by this point, evil.

*

Who the hell knew. (Who the hell knew anything, anymore?) For all Michael knows, Harry Potter could grow up and have a son in Slytherin and Blaise could grow up and become nothing at all. Less than nothing. Like he is claimed to be.

But there is nothing that Blaise does better than prove everyone wrong.

Michael Corner, standing still while Blaise Zabini attacks him with his spiderweb grip. Blaise takes after his mother in this, no matter how much he hates talking about her. Michael shivers while Blaise’s hands are full of him. He is terrified of Blaise and yet he loves to attack him, just to see what the hell will happen.

_So fucking perfect._

It is a dark time indeed when Michael centres around those words.

*

Michael was all right before Blaise came, but what was he before Blaise came? Not much, he thinks. Hell of an arse, who had nothing left to offer and even less to gain. He doesn’t know what he would have continued to become had Blaise not trailed his fingers down Michael’s spine and whispered something. Michael had been going down a bad path. He had done good things, but he was not a good person. Blaise had done bad things, but Michael continues to believe that he is a good person.

Michael doesn’t know why, anymore. It’s not like Blaise has done anything that makes Michael certain that he can be trusted, loved, or even believed. And that’s when Michael realises that he doesn’t know why he ever believed in Blaise in the first place. It had started with a whisper and a dropped slip of paper and a wink from Blaise, and then later, an owl with the sort of invitation that made Michael shiver, like Blaise’s fingers were still there, running down his spine.

The times they talk are rare and often heated and argumentative, what with Harry and the Battle of Hogwarts and the times (long gone, now) when Michael would ask Blaise what had happened between he and his mother. Blaise never answers, too scared, Michael thinks. That’s nearly contradictory because Blaise has always been seen, to Michael, as the antithesis of scared. He is, of course, the one who taught Michael that his opinion does not have to be molded to the majority, something Michael has always been terrified to learn.

Michael’s different than Blaise. He knows this - after all, Blaise has always described Michael as perfect, tossing his own self aside. But it’s more than that. According to the rest of the world, Michael is better than Blaise - the brave Ravenclaw in Dumbledore’s Army who fought against a man that the whole world automatically assumes Blaise was fighting for. It’s months before Michael wonders whether the whole damn story Blaise told him about corruption was solely to make Blaise seem less than evil - something that Michael never thinks he believed in the first place.

(And then it makes Michael horribly sad to realise that even if it was a trick of Blaise’s invention, it has a ring of solemn truth to it that Michael never managed to catch in the thousand speeches and stories told after the battle.)

*

Michael Corner, left standing still while Blaise peruses him, touches him, and every fibre of Michael’s being seems to erupt in a breath of fireworks and realisation of pain and joy and this was not how he meant to live his life. He meant, Michael thinks, to do something. Travel the world. Take a summer job at Gringotts. Train to be an Auror or a Healer. Instead, he stays in an apartment with fucking self-entitled battle scars hanging over him, thinking that this is the way to live.

This is what Blaise meant, Michael thinks, when he talks about self entitlement and Harry Potter and _this is how I am better than you._

He only wishes Blaise had mentioned beforehand that he was referring to Michael.  



End file.
